Saturday, March 01, 2014

Magazine downplays Syrian Jews' oppression

Four Syrian Jewish girls abducted, raped and murdered in 1974

In keeping with a persistent pattern in the mainstream media, National Geographic magazine (subscription only - March 2014) downplays the persecution of Syrian Jews. The media watchdog CAMERA sets the record straight:

It is fair to describe the Alawites of Syria as a "long-oppressed group (is it? They have been Syria's rulers - ed)," which National Geographic
does in its March 2014 feature about fighting in Syria. But in the same
paragraph, reporter Anne Barnard downplays the suffering of Syria's
Jews, stating only that "most left after the founding of Israel, when the government began viewing them with suspicion."

Was it mere "suspicion" (the author doesn't clarify whether the
mistrust was deserved or unfounded) that reduced a community of tens of
thousands to just a few dozen, or was it much worse?

It was in Syria that the "first serious blood libel in the Arab
world" targeted the Jewish community, historian Norman Stillman
explained. The charge that Jews murdered two Christians to use their
blood for Passover rituals in 1840 brought torture and death to the
Jewish community. Jewish children were taken hostage. A letter from
Damascus pleading for help reported that "the Governor with a body of
600 men proceeded to demolish the houses of his Jewish subjects, hoping
to find the bodies, but not finding any he returned and again inflicted
on them further castigations and torments, the most cruel of which was
the tying one end of a cord to the member of virility by the other end
of which they were dragged through the Governor's Palace to a water
closet into which they were thrown."

Nearly 100 years later, in 1936, JTA reported
that in Damascus, "Jewish shopkeepers were forced to join [a] general
strike under threats that their establishments would be burned down."

In 1944, the city's Jewish quarter "was twice attacked by mobs,"
Maurice Roumani pointed out in his chronicle of Jews in the Arab world.

The crescendo of anti-Jewish persecutions in the 1930s and 40s came
to a climax in 1947. That December in Aleppo, Roumani notes, "an unknown
number of Jews were butchered to death by mobs that burned four big
synagogues, 14 smaller ones and destroyed 150 homes." In short, "the
Jews of Syria were completely paralyzed, isolated and terrified."

In the years that followed, the emasculated Jewish community was
encumbered with severe travel restrictions, boycotts, and a virtual ban
from Syrian universities, and other indignities.

The plight of Jews in Arab countries has toooften been downplayed in the media.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)